The Conversation Africa has urged Journalists and academics to deepen their relationship, especially in the areas of research and dissemination, to boost human development and problem solving.
The organization, a website of researches, journals, podcast and reports among others, made the call on Thursday in Abuja at meeting with republishing partners.
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Regional Editor West Africa of the organization, Mr. Adejuwon Soyinka, said that it was important to further reduce the barriers between experts, who may be publishers, authors or academics and the public.
“It is important for published researches and articles to be made available to the public as can be seen in the Omicron and other variants of the COVID-19, whose researches on the situation were made available to the public by the media,” Soyinka said.
He also said that it is important to make researches on their platform free for republishing, since authors and researchers made them available free too, including podcast contents available for radio stations and the public.
“One of the motivations for scholars is to see their works published and this also serve as basis for promotions in some cases, apart from the benefits to the public,” he said.
On her part, the Manager, Strategic Partnerships West Africa, The Conversation Africa,
Anu Anibaba, said that the importance of strengthened collaboration and strategic partnership among academics, technology partners and the media should go beyond just publishing and republishing reports and researches.
She said that, since they are non-profit organization, the professors, experts and authors among others are also available for further discussions and other areas of collaborations.
Also, the Audience Development Manager of the organization, Usifo Omozokpea, said that there is no value for researches if the public does not know and benefits from them.
He said that the social media played key roles in the activities of The Conversation Africa, with the usage of twitter, Facebook and even WhatsApp, apart from bulletin which are subscribed to and received twice a week.
He also said that their largest audience are those between 18 and 25 years old of the 450,000 monthly readers on its website.
